


Goddamn Jared Kleinman

by orphan_account



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Btw I’m not good at writing dialogue so just brace yourselves, Canon Compliant, Fake Dating, I’m basically rewriting all of act 1 except AHAM and WTAW, M/M, act 2 will kinda just be all squished together, connor is still dead, kind of, plus to break in a glove words fail and finale, this’ll be like 8 ish parts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-08 11:28:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13457301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Almost canon except Evan lies that he and Connor were dating, not just friends, like Jared said.





	1. For Forever

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt from tumblr user yrobtsvt  
> Follow me on tumblr at halseam and halseamhllow

It was strange when Mr Murphy had shown him the letter. No, that wasn’t the strange part, it was the news that followed it. Oh sure, Evan didn’t really know Connor, but the fact that they were classmates since grade one and Connor felt he needed to do that, it broke Evan’s heart. He tried telling the Murphy’s that he didn’t know Connor and that the letter wasn’t Connor’s, he just couldn’t bring himself to. Mrs Murphy just looked so sad, so... heartbroken. He’s never seen someone that sad before.   
And suddenly they’re inviting him over to dinner. He tries to decline it, uses every excuse he can, but they insist.   
“I’m not good with people, especially strangers, I don’t-“  
“Bring a friend! Please, Evan, we want you over for supper. Please,”  
Cynthia holds his arms in a death grip. He gulps and nods, and slips out of the office without another word.   
That’s a problem. Bring a friend. He doesn’t exactly _have_ any friends. He can ask Jared, but Jared would just correct him and say family friend.   
But he doesn’t. Jared agrees and they’re standing together on the Murphy’s front porch, waiting for someone to answer the door. It’s Mrs Murphy that does so, her eyes red from crying. She invites the teen boys in and they immediately sit down for dinner, the food room-temperate on the cold side. Jared and Evan sit together, Zoe across from them and Mr and Mrs Murphy on either end. All five eat in complete silence.   
Until Mrs Murphy asks about their days.   
“Good,” Zoe mutters. Her voice has a sting of annoyance in it.   
“What about you, boys?”  
Evans mouth is full, so he simply awkwardly nods and lets Jared take the wheel.   
“He was crying earlier.” Jared says, patting Evan on the back.   
“Is that so?” Mr Murphy inquires, raising an eyebrow toward the boys.   
Evan can almost speak again when Jared cuts him off. “It’s not every day your boyfriend kills himself, is it?”  
Zoe’s head snaps up. Mr Murphy’s drains of all colour. Mrs Murphy shakes her head.   
“I’m sorry, what did you say? He was your boyfriend?”  
“No! No, he-he wasn’t my boyfriend!”  
“Aah, so you two weren’t official. That’s even worse.” Jared pokes at his food.   
“We didn’t know Connor was into guys,” Zoe asks, leaning back in her chair.   
Evan just sputters and looks around at everyone. Mr Murphy’s face is gaining colour again and Mrs Murphy is beginning to grin.   
“Oh, my goodness!” Mrs Murphy stands and hugs Evan tightly against her chest. “He had someone, Larry! And it wasn’t just a friend! I bet you two were real close.” She directs the last bit of her statement at Evan. She forces eye contact with him.   
Evan can see her excitement for her son. Jared snickers behind his hand. Evan gulps. He nods, not wanting to break Mrs Murphy’s heart any more. She just looks so happy, if he told her that he really did not know Connor, god knows what would happen.   
“I’m so sorry you have to go through this, Evan.” Mr Murphy speaks up. All eyes turn to him. “I never would have thought Connor was... but knowing you two were together, all of us are here for each other,”  
“I hope we can rely on you for comfort, Evan.”  
He turns to look at Mrs Murphy. He nods quickly.   
They spend the rest of the night talking in small bursts, Evan barely talking through all of them except one, when he just simply can’t stop himself.   
“We were- uh, we were friends and then he, um, he told me first and then we went on from there.”  
Mrs Murphy’s eyes soften and she smiles. “I bet you two had a lot of great times,”  
“I really don’t think that’s possible.” Zoe mutters, staring down at the dark oak table.   
“Zoe, that is not necessary,”  
“I grew up learning to always tell the truth. It was impossible to have a good time with him, that’s the simple truth!”  
“Zoe, he was capable of having fun, he only chose not to. He was a good person, no one let him be that good person,”  
“Are you kidding me?” Zoe guffaws, “He wasn’t a good person, he was a bad person!”  
Mrs Murphy sighs. “You brother was a complicated person,”  
“There’s a difference between _good_ and _complicated._ It was impossible to be happy with him in presence,”  
Mrs Murphy is about to say another thing when Jared cuts her off. “Evan and Connor had lots of good times! Remember, you would tell me all about it,”  
Out of habit, Evan nods. “There’s was this- uh- this one time we went to the...” He searches for something to build off of. An apple. “The apples... apples place.”  
The Murphy’s are silent. Mrs Murphy speaks up. “He took you to the orchard?”  
Evan nods around. “Yes! He said the apples there were, um, they were the best!”  
Mr Murphy talks. “I thought that place closed years ago.”  
“Yes! Which is why we were just so... bummed when we got there,”  
He and Jared team up to create an entire story about Evan and Connor’s first date and where they went, Jared coming up with the way Evan broke his arm, Evan the rest.   
“We got ice cream and everything. Mint chocolate, I think... anyway, he was so happy when we got it. He uh, he smiled, and everything,”  
Mrs Murphy clutches at her chest, tears forming in her eyes.   
“Then, we, we... uh.”  
Jared can sense Evan’s blank and adds on. “That was when you broke your arm, remember?” He elbows his fr- family friend.   
Evan lights up and begins talking again. “Right! Um, then we found a way in- the orchard- and he uh, he lead me across the field. He found a tree and we... we began climbing,” Evan looks around. “And then, then, we were climbing and... one of the branches broke and I was on the ground and my arm went numb. But, then, he came down and got me!”  
“This seems so far fetched,” Zoe mutters. “I don’t think he did that. You know how I can tell? The only time I ever saw him interact with you, Evan, was when he pushed you in the hall.”  
“He pushed you?” Mrs Murphy is more surprised than she has to be.   
“No, no, it’s a funny story, actually, because- because, he only did that because he didn’t want anyone knowing about us. I tried saying ‘hi’ to him after a few weeks and he didn’t want that, so he...” Evan quiets down when he catches Mr Murphy’s eye, “pushed me,”  
“Okay, so let me get this straight.” Zoe snickers and continues. “You two were dating, he didn’t want anyone knowing, we barely saw him leave the house, and you really don’t seem like the type to sneak out of your own after dark.” She raises an eyebrow. “When the actual hell did you two have interactions. _Good_ ones, at that?”  
“Emails,” Jared says with too much confidence. “They would email all the time, right Evan?”  
Evan nods and chokes back a gulp of water. “Yeah, all the time. Well, not all the time, but most of the time, like, whenever we had time. At lunch, breaks, uh, just whenever we had time,”  
“Y’know, the funny thing about this is that there are absolutely zero emails from you on Connor’s laptop.”  
“Yeah! He had a separate email account, one just for emailing me. That must have been extremely confusing, sorry,”  
“He knew we read his emails, Larry,”  
“Somebody had to be the bad guy,”  
“And that bad guy led him to- die!” Mrs Murphy’s voice breaks. Everyone falls silent, Mrs Murphy staring out into space with misty eyes.   
Mr Murphy pushes his chair out and stands. “I think dinner is over. You two can head home whenever you’d like,”  
“I think that went well,” Jared mutters only twenty minutes later when Mrs Murphy closes the door behind them.   
“What the hell, Jared?” Evan almost yells when they get in the car. “They think we were dating, now! I’ve messed- _you’ve_ messed everything up!”  
Jared shrugs. “I think I did you a favour.”  
“How?”  
“They were going to think you were secret gay lovers anyway. I just saved you the deal of creating a whole relationship on your own. You should be thanking me.”  
Evan just grunts and stares out the window in response. They spend the rest of the ride in complete silence, only saying quiet goodbyes when Evan gets out of the car.


	2. Sincerely, Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rewriting Sincerely, Me is really hard in this au wow

Jared comes over to Evans house the next day with his laptop and a paid-promise to help create fake emails. Sure, under the twenty dollars this situation is built on, Evan hates it, but how could he alone create them? They would be terrible, he absolutely knows it, so when Jared steps in and sits on the sofa, he seriously can’t tell whether the Murphy’s will find it believable.  
“So you sign off your sex letters-“  
“They’re not sex letters,”  
“-with ‘Sincerely, Me,’ right?”  
“Yeah,”  
“Need to end all of them like that,”  
Jared goes on to create a fake email for Connor, then begin composing the first one. “ _Dear, Evan Hansen..._ why don’t you go order some food.”  
And so Evan does. A large pepperoni pizza and that’s it, much to Jared’s dismay, but thank god Jared stopped writing because-  
“Why would you write that?”  
“I’m just trying to tell the truth, alright?”  
Evan rubs his temples. “Can you just... delete it and write something else? Or can I do it?”  
Jared rolls his eyes and passes the laptop to Evan’s lap, where he holds the backspace key and begins typing, slowly and consciously. He needs these emails to be perfect, believable, to prove they were actually ‘dating’. He’s finds he’s still uncomfortable with that word.  
Jared hovers over Evan’s shoulder. “Hard?” Evan replaces the word. “Bad?” Evan replaces it again. “Heh, kinky,”  
Evan rolls his eyes and moves on with Jared’s snide comments loud in his left ear. Fingers dance over the keyboard, Jared taking the laptop back to edit only a minute later. And, God, does Evan wish he hadn’t.  
“Crack!?” Evan sputters. Jared groans after fixing Evan’s own mistake, backspacing and fixing his own.  
Jared goes on to write like a madman, adding sentences that, in hindsight, don’t sound like Connor at all, yet still put in because Evan wants to convince the Murphy’s that he was helping Connor. Jared sighs when he finishes the last line. “Are we done yet?”  
“No! I can’t just give them one email, I wanna prove that I was a good f- ‘boyfriend’, you know,”  
“Okay first of all, calm down, do you need a paper bag to breathe into?”  
“No, I don’t.”  
“Really? Because you seem like you’re having considerable trouble breathing,”  
“I’m not having trouble breathing!” Evan drops the subject at the flip of a coin and begins saying what he wants Jared to write. “Dear, Connor Murphy, yes I also miss our talks...”  
Jared types the first line. Then completely disregards what Evan says with blatant ‘no’s and ‘absolutely not’s thrown about. Evan groans and leads what he knows Jared will write.  
The first line Jared writes of the next one, the next _Connor_ one, is obviously-  
“You’re really hot,” Jared reads out in a mock Connor voice.  
Evan’s head snaps his way. He glares. “What the hell?”  
“My bad.” Jared shrugs, backspaces, and begins typing again.  
They finish a few letters. _Dear, Evan Hansen, thanks for every note you send... Dear, Connor Murphy, I’m just glad to be boyfriends._ Jared suggests letting the Murphy’s into Evan’s brain by saying, and reiterating, that they’re not gay. But, no, they have to think they were a couple. They can’t include something that says otherwise. Jared sighs and by the end of the night, half of the pizza gone, they have at least twenty emails done. Evan promises to print all of them out before school tomorrow, then bring them to the Murphy’s, including that he will _not_ need Jared’s help unless it comes down to it, but the thought of getting caught and having to call your family friend for help almost makes Evan panic itself.  
The next day rolls around all too slowly. The halls are crowded and the silence is too much. An email went out to everyone and their dog yesterday about Connor, so people whisper behind their hands and cry during class and barely speak at all. Multiple notifications from the school get sent out throughout the week with suicide prevention lines and positive reassurances. It’s all too much.  
So he avoids the downstairs computer lab, avoiding the last standing memory of Connor with it. A couple loud voices echo through the hall and, although he knows completely well they’re not coming into the computer lab, Evan begins bouncing on the balls of his feet and his throat clenches up. He blinks a few times as the voices pass and when he looks back down at the printer, the last email is printed and he’s rushing out with them in his hand.  
The fresh air is amazing for Evan’s oesophagus and the feeling of soft dirt under his shoes makes his legs more steady. He stops vibrating and catches a city bus to the Murphy’s house.  
City buses were always better to Evan. Sure, they were dirtier and smellier than school buses, but they were also emptier and quieter, less scary and anxiety-fuel ran low in city buses. The freedom to sit at the back and not feel like you’re invading rich teenagers space is amazing, and an excuse to get off through the middle door and not pass the driver awkwardly. The thought of meeting some crazy cat lady that wants to talk to him so he misses his stop nags at the back of his mind, still, though the giant empty metal tube on wheels.  
A large brown house comes into view, shaking Evan from his thoughts of- city buses? Okay, then.  



	3. Requiem

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I only did about half of Requiem because it was really hard to transition between characters. Sorry!!

Zoe’s ride home isn’t the most ideal, people pestering her with flowers and cards and their offers of condolences the entire way, only to be shunned away and told to ‘fuck off’ immediately. A couple girls back away at a simple glare, hiding the cards behind their backs and scurrying off. Her day doesn’t get much better when she enters the house with the red door, where Evan and her mom are sitting at the couch with a stack of papers in her moms hand.   
“Zoe! You’re home!” Her mom beams when she tries rushing past the living room unnoticed. “How was your day back at school?”  
“Delightful. Everyone suddenly wants to be my friend.” Zoe takes a step in and Larry leads Evan out behind her. “I’m the dead kids sister, didn’t you know?”  
“Honey- we’re all grieving in our own way-“  
“Oh, yeah, I’m just so sad the guy that antagonised me every day for the last five years is fucking dead. What a tragedy!”  
Cynthia coils back and shakily waves a pile of papers in the air. “Evan brought these over.” She sets half the pile on the arm of the sofa. “You can read them- when you’re ready.”   
And with that, Cynthia leaves Zoe alone in the large living room, silent. A beat. Zoe tiptoes over and replaces her backpack with the pile of papers. She reads the first line and rolls her eyes.   
‘Why should I even pretend? Remembering through everyone else’s eyes?’ She thinks. ‘“Such a great son and wonderful friend!” Don’t the tears just pour.’  
She imagines what everyone thinks she’s doing. Curling up, hiding in her room, there in her bed still sobbing tomorrow. She could just give into all of that, but what for? Why should she have a heavy heart? Why should she say ‘I’ll keep you with me?’ Why should she just go and fall apart for him?  
‘I can’t play the grieving girl. Lie, saying “I’ll miss you” and that my “world has gone dark without your light,”’  
How can she be sad or angry or even disappointed right now? If anything, she feels enlightened. Her parents can now pay attention to her. Sometimes.   
“I’m going to bed.” Larry stands in the doorway of his sons bedroom, his wife on the bed, staring at the things on Connor’s shelf.   
“Come sit with me,” Cynthia pleads, sitting on the bed with a snow globe in her hand.   
“Cynthia-“  
“You can’t stand to be in this room for five minutes?”  
“I’m exhausted.”  
“You know, Larry, at some point you’re going to have to start dealing-“  
“Not tonight. Please.”  
She picks up a few papers from her lap and thrusts them towards Larry. He shakes his head. “Just read these?”  
A beat. “I’ll leave the light on for you.” He leaves and begins getting ready for bed. He gave Connor everything he wanted in life, yet he just threw it out like a piece of paper, leaving all these broken pieces of a family behind. All this money and room wasted, yet absolutely nothing to say to his family. He tries to imagine what it’s like to mourn this.   
Cynthia runs at her eyes, not daring to cry. She can’t. Her little boy is gone. Connor’s gone. As she stares down at the paper, though, she can somehow hear his voice in the back of her head, find him in the words, as if he’s right in the room with her, not in a coffin buried six feet underground across town. At least she now has Evan, letting her know that Connor is still here.   
It hurts. Like she’s replacing her boy. Her boy. Connor. Who was in so much pain, but never net anyone know. She thought she was there for him, she thought she was doing a good job, or at least as best she could, but look at it now. She tries not to let the tears escape. It’s impossible. Her son is gone, for good.


End file.
